result of their situation the Eskimos led a very different life
from that of the Indians to the south. They must rely on fishing and
hunting for food. In that almost treeless north they had no wood to
build boats or houses, and no vegetables or plants to supply them
either with food or with the materials of industry. But the very rigour
of their surroundings called forth in them a marvellous ingenuity. They
made boats of seal skins stretched tight over walrus bones, and clothes
of furs and of the skins and feathers of birds. They built winter
houses with great blocks of snow put together in the form of a bowl
turned upside down. They heated their houses by burning blubber or fat
in dish-like lamps chipped out of stones. They had, of course, no
written literature. They were, however, not devoid of art. They had
legends and folk-songs, handed down from generation to generation with
the utmost accuracy. In the long night of the Arctic winter they
gathered in their huts to hear strange monotonous singing by their
bards: a kind of low chanting, very strange to European ears, and
intended to imitate the sounds of nature, the murmur of running waters
and the sobbing of the sea. The Eskimos believed in spirits and
monsters whom they must appease with gifts and incantations. They
thought that after death the soul either goes below the earth to a
place always warm and comfortable, or that it is taken up into the cold
forbidding brightness of the polar sky. When the aurora borealis, or
Northern Lights, streamed across the heavens, the Eskimos thought it
the gleam of the souls of the dead visible in their new home.

Farthest east of all the British North American Indians were the
Beothuks. Their abode was chiefly Newfoundland, though they wandered
also in the neighbourhood of the Strait of Belle Isle and along the
north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence. They were in the lowest stage
of human existence and lived entirely by hunting and fishing. Unlike
the Eskimos they had no dogs, and so stern were the conditions of their
life that they maintained with difficulty the fight against the rigour
of nature. The early explorers found them on the rocky coasts of Belle
Isle, wild and half clad. They smeared their bodies with red ochre,
bright in colour, and this earned for them the name of Red Indians.
From the first, they had no friendly relations with the Europeans who
came to their shores, but lived in a state of perpetual war with them.